"Under PM Modi, they have shed a little bit of the Congress' party non-alignment philosophy and they do more military training exercises with United States and other nations," Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia said during a Congressional hearing.

"And it is also a nation with a strong technological capacity. So just to use them as an example...We're talking about analysing India as a potential ally in the cyber cooperation arrangement," Kaine said, advocating a strong relationship with India.

Samantha Ravich, senior advisor, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said in terms of where India plays is high and evolving on the technology.

"Another area of shared interest that you might want to look at is if they are facing a problem similar to us so there might be a threat like a country, but there also could be...A particular sector where you are facing challenges and we're facing challenges in the same sector," Kaine said.

"That might suggest that, cooperation on all of cyber defence, but at least let's shore up our utility sector or our financial sectors at risk. So for purposes of R&D or other things that we could focus on a sector and make each of our nation stronger, so that would be probably another area that we should look at," he said.

In her testimony, Ravich said, China has been engaged in a massive, prolonged campaign of intellectual property theft against US firms, costing potentially hundreds of billions of dollars and more than two million jobs.

"China's IP theft campaign constitutes a large, if not the largest, part of what appears to be Beijing's overall cyber-enabled economic warfare strategy against the US and the West more generally, which they themselves have described as, quote, 'a form of non-military warfare', which is just as terribly destructive as a bloody war, but in which no blood is actually shed," she said.

Recently, Beijing punished a private South Korean company in part by denial-of-service attacks for participating in the THAAD deployment.

The revenue loss was marginal, but the move has prompted deep concerns in Seoul, she added.

"South Korea exported over $120 billion to China last year, about a quarter of the country's total exports and is particularly vulnerable to Chinese coercion. A possible result, South Korean President Moon has suspended for the deployment of THAAD," Ravich said.

"However, Washington and its allies have been slow to comprehend the threat from China primarily because they view each cyber-enabled economic attack individually as separate incidents instead of collectively as elements in an overall coordinated campaign," she rued.